‘Live from London, this is the BBC.’

That is how the story would begin in our small home in Gaza’s al-Shati Camp.

The broadcaster’s voice would ring out from the radio in our house – tucked away carefully, far from the outside world – and we would listen to London from a place that, at the time, seemed further than we could have ever imagined.

I never dreamt that one day I would be standing here.

I never dreamt that I would be in London, standing in one of the world’s greatest libraries, in this place that holds the memory of humanity – their books, their voices, and their dreams.

But as surely as Palestine and Gaza and the free people of the world carry us, here I am today, standing before you.

Perhaps it was our long struggle against the Israeli occupation, our fight for freedom, our steadfastness in the face of death and our countless escapes from it that brought me here.

Perhaps, too, I was brought here by the blood of our martyrs and the wounded – numbering 74,250 martyrs and 175,278 injured – those who paid a heavy price so that the word ‘freedom’ might remain alive.

But I believe there is another power.

It is the power of the pen.

The power of the word.

That pen – for which its wielder might pay a heavy price simply for speaking the truth, standing up to injustice, or refusing to remain silent in the face of oppression – wherever it may be found, whether in one’s homeland or anywhere else in the world.
For me, writing is not a profession.

Writing is liberation.

Writing is freedom.

Writing is saying what others cannot, giving a voice to those who have been silenced.

It is about the writer holding a courageous literary and intellectual stance.

To view the world with open eyes, to dare to critique the wrongs humans commit against one another and to expose them – without fear, without evasion, without seeking a safe haven in which to hide.

Here, I am reminded of a great writer who profoundly influenced my own journey: Harold Pinter.

I had the honour of performing in one of his seminal works, One for the Road, in 1994.

For me, Pinter is more than just a great writer.

His approach to writing was a lesson in courage.

He believed that a writer must view the world without fear, and insist on revealing the truth, even when the truth is painful; especially when confronting authority, the dominant culture, and society comes at a cost greater than silence.

And today, as I stand here, I want to say something to my fellow writers, artists and all free people of the world: our people in Gaza are still, to this very moment, trying to survive bombardment, displacement, and constant terror.

Thousands of people are still living in tents unsuitable for any human to live in.

That is why I hope you will free your pens.

Hone them.

For the written word has always been the secret of our existence.

It is what remains when its creators are gone.

It is what preserves the names of those who have departed.

It is what transcends time, bringing us the voices of those who came before – their legends, their tales, their dreams – and helping us to understand the meaning of life.

Oh, my extended family…

Oh, family of brave writers across the world…

Help us survive.

Give us some hope for a better tomorrow.

Tell the children our story.

Tell them that children in Gaza used to dream just like them.

They wanted to grow up.

To go to school.

To play.

To love.

To simply live.

Then the war came.

And the war didn’t end.

And perhaps, for many of us, it didn’t end even after we left.

I am one of the few who managed to leave Gaza after years of fleeing death – and after years spent trying to help others survive it.

I have pulled children from beneath the rubble.

At one point, my son, his wife, and their children were trapped under the rubble while my neighbours tried to pull them out, all while I was simultaneously trying to rescue other neighbours.

In Gaza, life and death exist side by side – so closely that the difference between them might be nothing more than chance.
A mere moment.

A piece of shrapnel whizzes past your head, missing by a single millimetre, and you live. Or you turn your head and you die.
Just chance.

That is why, even after seeking refuge in France, the war has never left me.

It still dwells within me.

Sometimes I wake at night and turn on my phone’s torch to illuminate the path ahead.

Then I remember that I am no longer in Gaza.

The only place in the world where there is no electricity is Gaza. I still can’t wrap my head around that.

When I eat, I still eat only a little and save the rest. Deep down, I harbour that fear of famine – and fear for my grandchildren.
In France, when I take a shower, I splash just a little water on my body and then turn it off, conserving the rest. After I get out I realise there’s plenty of water here.

War doesn’t end when you leave a place.

Sometimes, you leave the place but it remains in your body, in your soul.

In your memory.

In your little habits.

In your fear of light, darkness, food, roads, and sounds.

A few days ago I was on the train. I wanted to lower the window shade. I lowered it a little and looked out the window. So many trees, stretching on and on. My mind wandered for a moment and I thought of Gaza.

I remembered the olive trees and the orange trees.

I remembered the land that used to sustain us.

I remembered the trees that the occupation uprooted and burned.

And I felt a strange joy as I watched the sheep and cows grazing in the grass.

That probably doesn’t seem like an extraordinary sight to you. But for a man who came from Gaza, that sight was nothing short of a miracle.

Our livestock have been destroyed. In Gaza, as I know it, there is no longer a single cow or a flock of sheep. Even the little sparrow – the one that used to live in our homes and on our balconies, waking us up in the morning – are no longer seen.

When houses are demolished, birds’ nests disappear. It seems the occupation is angry at the birds of Gaza too.

When trees are killed, the land loses not only its shade: it loses its memory.

Before I wrote these words, I thought about them for weeks. Hundreds of ideas came to me. I crossed out a lot. And I wrote a lot. I grew fatigued and said I wouldn’t write anymore. Because I know the importance of the word.

And I know that when a writer stands before an audience, they’re not just reciting a script.

They bring a stance.

Memories.

They bring the faces of people who may never be able to reach this place.

And so, as I stand among you today, I do not want to speak only about the war. I want to tell you about my homeland.

About the Gaza I love.

About its trees.

About its birds.

About its children.

About its streets.

About its kind people.

About its dreams, which the war has not been able to extinguish completely.

I’m writing these words from inside the train as I return from Paris to Laval, that small village that sometimes feels to me like my neighbourhood back in Gaza. It resembles it in the faces of its kind people. In their simplicity. In their ability to make a stranger feel as though they are not entirely a stranger. And that is why I stand among you today in London, carrying with me something greater than a personal story. I carry a message of humanity and humaneness to the whole world.

I carry the message of my people.

A people who want freedom.

A people who want life.

A people who want to be able to dream like the rest of the people of the world.

Before I end my speech, I would like to extend my thanks to English PEN and PEN International, who have made every effort through communication, coordination and hands-on management to enable me to stand among you today. And my thanks go to the brave writer, Jacqueline Rose, for selecting me for this award.

For me, this prize is not an honour bestowed upon a single individual. It is a recognition of the many voices that cannot reach this place.

I promise to remain true to my pen. True to humanity. Believing that while a writer cannot stop a tank with a pen, they can prevent the truth from being buried beneath its rubble.

I believe that the written word has the power to change things.

To reveal.

To preserve memory.

To inspire hope.

And to make a difference.

That is why I will continue to write.

I will continue to speak about Gaza – not because I wish to remain a prisoner of the war, but because I want to reclaim from the war what it tried to take from us: our humanity.

From Gaza, Palestine, to every corner of the globe:

You have our love.

You have our voices.

You have our story.

‘Live from London…’

That voice used to reach us via the radio. And today, from a small house in the al-Shati camp, after everything that has happened…

Here.

Live from London.

The post Live From London appeared first on English PEN.

A group of birds journey through seven valleys under the guidance of the wise hoopoe, confronting their flaws and attachments, before realising that the truth they seek is themselves. The phoenix, or Simorgh being made up of ‘si’ meaning thirty, and ‘morgh’ bird. A flotilla sets sail to enact the possibility of a collective future free from apartheid, racism, imperialism, colonialism, ecocide and all forms of oppression, a possibility represented by a basic humanitarian task of delivering aid to Gaza by sea, breaking a siege that no government or institution has attempted to challenge so clearly. The mission itself is the Flotilla’s success. As The Conference of the Birds reminds us, such journeys do not arise from nowhere.

There are many recurring translations of the title of Attar’s masterwork: ‘canticle’, ‘conference’, ‘congregation’, and so on. But the Persian title translates more directly as ‘logic’. While interpretations of the text often centre the question of the journey and its spiritual quest to find the mythical Simorgh, to gloss over the preamble to the journey is to omit the text’s central premise: the discussion between the birds.

I was re-minded of this recently as I looked for a short passage to use for a translation workshop for the Poetry Translation Centre. I struggled to find, say, six lines that would work together cohesively for the purpose. The birds are opinionated and verbose, ready to defend their luxuries and comforts, ready not to embark on what they imagine will be an arduous journey with no clear outcome. They all have excuses: the nightingale steps up first as the traditional poet-lover and seduces the assembly recounting his adoration of the rose, claiming that he couldn’t possibly leave it behind; the goldfinch claims it’s too weak, too slight to survive the journey; the duck doesn’t want to leave the water – the purity it promises; the parrot believes its gilded cage is its ticket to eternal life; the osprey is too proud; the owl too greedy; the partridge too enamoured with the glimmer of its jewels; the peacock believes in another paradise; the ringdove is too hesitant. They all make their case to the assembly and, one by one, the hoopoe nimbly unpicks their arguments, convinces them to try. Reminding that the rose is not only thorny but ephemeral, that true freedom can’t be found in a cage, that giving up an illusory comfort might be the only way to discover a wider truth.

The hoopoe – named onomatopoeically in English, after its song – is a fairly widespread species found in Africa, Europe, and across Asia. Why Attar chose the hoopoe as the one who nudges its fellow birds on to the journey of enlightenment is not known. It could have something to do with its awesome appearance: an impressive bill, black-and-white feathers that drape over its body like a cape, and a stunning shock of black-tipped orange feathers that crown its head like an orator’s headdress. Reading up about the bird, I was intrigued to learn that its nesting habits are referred to as ‘optimistic’ – in that it usually lays a clutch of ten eggs on the understanding that not all will survive. Similarly, not all the birds that embark on the journey through the seven valleys will make it. But the birds that don’t even try will fare no better; only those that confront their realities and wrestle with their doubts will eventually set out towards the promise of something bigger than themselves. Some of them will even see the future that their actions contribute to, and experience it for themselves.

As we approach a third year of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, the relentless violence also expanding to the West Bank,  to Israel’s occupation of South Lebanon, and with the tinderbox of the US’s ongoing threats against Iran, Attar’s text bestows us with increasingly urgent tools:

~ to doubt

In an interview with Linn Ullmann, the poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson shared a recent realisation: ‘I was just reading something about Descartes, and Descartes said this famous sentence “Cogito ergo sum” – I think, therefore I am – which everybody knows and learns in school. But if you look at the sentence, really it says “Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum.” I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am’. She goes on to note, ‘Isn’t that surprising? I didn’t know it either because I never looked it up.’ Arundhati Roy wryly reflected, in a similar way, on the slipperiness of words left unchecked in her acceptance speech for the PEN Pinter Prize in 2024:

The Pinter Prize is awarded to a writer who has sought to define ‘the real truth of our lives and our societies’ through ‘unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination’. That is a quote from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

The word ‘unflinching’ made me pause for a moment, because I think of myself as someone who is almost permanently flinching.

To flinch – to ‘tense the muscles involuntarily in anticipation of discomfort’ as visceral signifier of a push-pull, body to brain, hesitating to communicate honestly. Gut feeling and unease as manifestations of a critical engagement with a status quo. The birds teach us to heed these messages and dare to walk the path they take us down.

~ to discuss

Do so in community, like the birds. In today’s world, I understand Attar’s poem as a call to collective action. It is asking us to think about how we organise, about how we mobilise. The final realisation – that together the birds make up the Simorgh – can only come about because of their active engagement, through words, with one another. Not everyone needs to agree definitely, but together they are able to consider honestly where are they headed, and realise the agency that they have in determining where they want to be headed. As the birds learn that their quest was in their own image, Attar reminds us that our future will also be in our image. To cross reams of wor(l)ds representing seven arduous valleys in order to reach this understanding also reminds us that our efforts may feel futile, because we cannot fathom the bigger picture they sit within.

In Po Si Teng’s 2026 documentary American Doctor, three volunteer American doctors in Gaza become undeniable eyewitnesses to the horrors of the genocide and, upon their return, take every opportunity to speak to the media, US senators, medical conferences, and community gatherings. In one scene, trauma surgeon Dr Feroze Sidhwa gives a crushing speech at the Jewish Voice for Peace Convention after his second trip to Gaza as a volunteer – a trip he wishes he hadn’t returned from, because he suspects he won’t be let back in, and understands his greatest ‘value’ in this genocide as being a doctor on the ground with his Gazan colleagues. Standing at a lectern, speaking to an assembly gathered to consider their role in stopping the violence, he shares:

I don’t think honestly that my, probably, combined, thirty-five minutes on American corporate television stuff has been all that useful, to be honest. I don’t think it has made any difference in the popular perception of things at all… and then the advocacy we’ve been doing with the American government and other institutions… I’ve got to be honest with you, it seems pretty useless. I don’t think we’ve… at least what I’ve seen… it hasn’t made one dent of difference in anything. But, the point of all of this, is… is this. So, this is from an anaesthesiologist named Nizar… I got this just yesterday. He says, ‘You know I have a 5‑year-old boy named Keenan.’ Today I asked him ‘How many kinds of birds do you know?’ He answered: ‘I know quadcopter, helicopter, apache, F16 and F35.’

~ to refuse

The point of all this, is: wandering around the ‘Canticle of the Birds’ exhibition at the Aga Khan Centre in London this summer, I encountered a pleasing range of responses to the poem – from pottery to sound art, miniature painting to sculpture. But I was most moved by the piece at the entrance of the exhibition: a large display entitled The Gathering of Songbirds. Conceived by Jane Lee McCracken, founder of Drawing for the Planet, and made in collaboration with Songbird Survival, the piece brings together drawings of disappeared British songbirds made by Year 5 pupils from the local King’s Cross Academy, where the piece now lives. The polyphony of Attar’s text was beautifully represented in this piece, in which small hands with varying levels of formal artistry sketched birds of all shapes and sizes. Birds whose songs we may never hear again. Birds who, represented visually together on a large canvas, are remembered, but silent.

The point of all this, is: the refusal of an erasure is the beginning of a journey.

The post The Future Will Be in Our Image appeared first on English PEN.

I am a waiting man. I say this with some shame, because waiting has the ugly smell of innocence. A person who waits can always pretend the crime belongs elsewhere. The bombers act, officials lie, analysts arrange danger into clean blocks of probability, and I sit in England with a phone in my hand, a small priest of helplessness.

Let me be exact about that helplessness. I enjoy it when it gives me a shape: the moral posture of a man far away, wounded by distance. I refresh the page with a serious face. I open the exchange rate as if I am touching the pulse of a country. I say, I am concerned. What a wonderful word. Concerned. A word with clean fingernails.

The war had ended, or that was the sentence people were using. No one I knew believed the tense. We have been trained by ceasefires that behave like pauses for reloading. An ending should return time to its ordinary scale. This one made time thinner. It shaved down the day until all that remained was a message beginning with that cowardly phrase: high probability.

I was in England, in a room where nothing was happening. Outside, the lane and hedges belonged to an episode of Postman Pat. The electricity worked. There was bread in the kitchen. I had the full equipment of ordinary safety and the body of someone under warning.

Before I stood up, I reached for my phone. The apps loaded. I felt relief, then immediately hated the relief. I checked the dollar against the toman, even though my rent here wouldn’t change. I opened a flight tracker; I had no flight to follow. I was following the possibility of flight: panic dressed as geography.

You might say that anyone would do the same. That is the problem. Under abnormal pressure, habit can become obedience before it feels like a choice. One refreshes, forwards, waits for confirmation, pretends to be careful. One calls it staying informed, because other names are less flattering. The other name is obedience.

The war had ended, but the ending had not ended. It remained in the room like a gas with no smell. It entered through the phone and settled inside the joints. It trained the thumb to refresh. Sleep became light and suspicious. Even with the phone face down, the wall opposite my bed became a screen.

Every conversation in Persian had become a threshold. The word liminal comes from limen: a threshold. I dislike the academic word because it cleans the room too quickly. But I need the promise inside it. A threshold implies passage: however cruel the crossing, there is supposed to be a door somewhere. But how do you cross a threshold that has grown as large as a country and continues feeding on you beyond its borders? Here there was no door.

The threshold had been forced open by military power and kept open by threat. It led nowhere. It held people inside prediction. The old order had cracked, but the next was withheld. The middle kept trembling under hands placed on it from far away.

Above, the sky was being closed by Israeli and American agents: jet fighters, drones, surveillance, air defence, guarantees, the confidence of force that can arrive faster than a person can finish a sentence into the phone. I love you, Baba. Don’t forget your pills. Call me when you wake up. Are you home? Then the signal breaks. Dust climbs the street. The unfinished sentence stays lit for a few seconds. The person it was meant for is moved into another category: missing, unaccounted for, casualty, status unknown, pending identification, presumed dead, confirmed dead, remains recovered, identity withheld; each news channel gives the category a different name.

Below, the Iranian state answered with missiles and the language of retaliation and endurance. These forces are not equivalent in power or responsibility. The diagram cannot settle that question. It records a more intimate fact: Iranian counterforce also passes through ordinary life. The people in the middle are made to live where the vectors meet.

Both triangles face downwards. That is how I drew them, though the drawing lies by making them look equal. One marks the closure of space from above. The other marks counterforce from below. Their angles meet in kitchens, petrol stations, group chats, pharmacies, airport roads. The diagram remains abstract until someone checks whether their child’s school will open.

Geopolitics enters the house carrying a charger instead of a flag.

Charge the phone! Keep documents near the door! Check whether the bank card works! Ask whether the road is safe! Call your mother and steady your voice! Refresh a channel you despise because it might be wrong in a useful direction!

A rumour arrives. It has no source – or too many, which is worse. Forwarding has dissolved its origin. It speaks calmly. That calm is obscene. The airspace may close. District X should evacuate. High probability: two words that give gossip the manners of intelligence.

The message may be false. But the obedience it produces, whether from fear or patriotism, is immediately measurable.

Someone fills a tank. Rice disappears from a shelf. A passport leaves the drawer. Shoes wait near the door. A mother is called. A phone reaches 100%. Before truth catches up, the rumour has won a small administrative victory over the day.

And I, from England, participate. This is what disgusts me. I do not even have the dignity of danger. I have comfort with a live feed: working Wi-Fi, bread in the kitchen, a kettle that clicks off obediently. Beside me, my orange cat, Dr Meowssadegh, demands another cube of dried salmon. Outside, the wet road is absurdly peaceful while the phone produces a country at the edge of another catastrophe.

Distance does not remove me from the event. It gives me a cheaper form of suffering, and I resent that cheapness because I still pay with sleepless nights and lost dreams.

Guilt is a slippery little animal. It dresses itself up as seriousness and whispers: suffer properly, forward responsibly, stay awake, become useful through agitation. I distrust it. Guilt wants a role. It wants to stand in the photograph with the injured.

The harder truth is limitation. From here, I cannot protect the people I love. I cannot verify every claim. Nor can I become an emergency service for a place I cannot reach. Fear does not become useful because it’s sincere. Sincerity is often panic with better manners.

Another message arrives: high probability. I read it, then turn the phone face down. I have learned no discipline; my hand wants the screen.

I take out the notebook and draw the diagram again.

From above: US–Israel. From below: Iran. The triangles narrow towards a small circle. I have drawn this circle many times without naming it. Perhaps I wanted a neutral centre, a place innocent of the forces pressing on it. There is no such place.

I write ‘ORDINARY LIFE’ inside the circle.

The words barely fit. The ‘O’ touches one line; the ‘E’ is cut by another. I press harder, as if pressure could make the centre legible. On the reverse of the page, the letters rise as dents. The next sheet receives them without consent.

The phone lights up again beside my hand. The probability may be high or low. The message may be true, or useful to whoever wants a population to move before it knows why. I do not forward it. I do not congratulate myself.

I add one more arrow, then another. At the point marked ‘ORDINARY LIFE’, the paper gives way.

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‘The Rope’ (‘Al Habel’) and ‘Jamal’ (‘A Camel’) by Ibrahim Shaddad, and ‘The Tomb’ (‘Al Dhareeh’) and ‘The Station’ (‘Al Mahatta’) by Eltayib Mahdi, screened at ‘Sudanese Cinema, 1964 Onwards’ in London, are by two pioneers of the second generation of Sudanese cinema. Shaddad and Mahdi’s careers began in the 70s and 80s, when they worked within the Cinema Department of the Sudanese Ministry of Culture. Together, they founded ‘The Sudanese Film Group’ in 1989. It lasted just two months before Al-Bashir’s coup, after which censorship and repression became the norm.

All cinemas in Sudan were shut down; they remain closed to this day. In a radio interview at the time, Shaddad said that “Sudanese cinema had not died but had been killed”, a statement whose mere utterance represented a threat to his life.

‘The Rope’, ‘Jamal’, ‘The Tomb’ and ‘The Station’ are considered films of resistance against oppression, poverty, and social injustice; because direct statements posed a danger, the use of symbol became necessary to signal objection. These works construct their narrative in the absence of speech, rather than its presence.

The opening of ‘The Station’ consists of an image with no dialogue. The film’s events unfold over roughly a quarter of an hour, during which time the director addresses the crisis of urban development that fails to benefit residents of a village. It is revealed through the movement of camels on a paved road, followed by the appearance of a group of people carrying a sick child, walking as they wait for transport to the city. The point, here, is the voices of those who are marginalised – the margin of the paved road, alongside the persistent dream of achieving passage, embodied in the tin cars that children make and play with by the roadside, a symbol of a dream of a better tomorrow and of change that is inevitably, surely, coming.

What Mahdi does in ‘The Station’ is akin to ellipsis in a novel, where the writer deliberately withholds direct explanation and leaves the reader to infer meaning from a small act or detail. The film omits narrative explanation and replaces it with a visual detail: cars are everywhere, yet they fail to perform their intended function. It is what a novelist does when describing feeling and place: describing an empty room, instead of writing “I am alone.”

In ‘Jamal’, Shaddad employs silence alongside the sound of a machine, focusing on image and lighting, the contrast between light and dark, and the expression of freedom versus submission and surrender. The film is a meditation on the perpetual conflict between untouched nature and civilisation, and the encroachment of urbanisation upon wildlife.

‘Jamal’ relies on a language of silence to narrate its story – simple on its surface, profound at its core, especially in its ending, with the camel’s surrender to an inescapable fate. This film is an example of the kind of allegory exemplified by works such as Kalīla wa-Dimna and Orwell’s Animal Farm. Shaddad gives the camel overlapping symbolisms – including as a symbol of the human being who works as though he were a cog in a machine. In the novels, this identification between animal and human is built through deliberate description and narratorial commentary that guides the reader toward a symbolic reading. In the film, it is built through the visual movement of a newborn camel freely riding on its mother’s back, and its later confinement in captivity in a pen among poultry; the contrast is articulated through a cut scene, and not through a descriptive sentence.

Though Shaddad denied that ‘Jamal’ was symbolic, stating in an interview that the film is direct and expresses human suffering, and animal suffering, judgment belongs to the viewer, not the director; as a writer, I have grown accustomed to leaving readers room to understand and interpret.

‘The Tomb’ runs for approximately 17 minutes, during which Mahdi explores the rise of extreme Islamist currents and people’s susceptibility to superstition and religious exploitation. Mahdi opens the film with African folk music built on wind and percussion instruments, without neglecting the faint sound of the desert alongside it. The film is not entirely without dialogue, but it is sparse; the film’s principal language is an explanatory silence grounded in visual expression. To draw another novelistic comparison, ‘The Tomb’ builds its narrative as some writers build from an epigraph. Like placing a proverb at the start of a chapter, Mahdi weaves the entire plot of ‘The Tomb’ from the popular saying ‘we are buried together’;  the proverb is not a frame for an already existing story, but the very seed of the plot itself.

Sound in Shaddad’s ‘The Rope’ is the link that connects two men and what happens around them; both protagonists are blind, and sound alone is their window onto the world. Sound embodies the omniscient narrator, who knows what the characters do not (the massacre occurring beyond the reach of their awareness), while we, the viewers, share that same limited awareness with the characters. We know no more than the character herself knows.

These four films display how when cinema abandons dialogue it does not lose its narrative tools, but rather translates them: novelistic ellipsis is answered by the cut of montage; linguistic symbol is answered by visual symbol; interior monologue is answered by facial expression; the omniscient narrator becomes the ambient soundtrack.

In discussing these films and their role in resistance, we must address the many risks faced by Sudanese writers and filmmakers. Since the coup, these have included the strict censorship of books, scripts, and screenings; the closure of cinemas; and the continuous persecution of artists, which drove directors such as Ibrahim Shaddad to halt production for many years (despite influential early works like ‘The Rope’ and ‘Jamal’), and led to the emigration of many cinematic talents in search of space for expression.

A brief, relative opening occurred after the December Revolution, between 2019–2023, allowing the return of some cinematic activity and independent initiatives such as the Sudan Film Festival. But this opening remained fragile and individual. Then came the war, which caused the direct destruction of cultural infrastructure, the forced displacement and exile of writers and directors, and posed a real danger to the lives of those who documented violence and wartime atrocities.

Despite all these challenges, Sudanese literary and artistic production has not stopped; filmmaking has continued to be practised not because of state support, but despite its lack. And now the names of young directors have emerged whose films have managed to compete in international festivals; through our art, we will continue to tell them: you cannot silence us.

The post Silence as Expression, Symbol, and the Risks Facing Sudanese Writers and Filmmakers appeared first on English PEN.

Young children were running between the rows of idling cars. Sweat glistened on their foreheads as they weaved from one car window to the next, bottles of cold water in hands, shouting, ‘Cold water! Get your cold water!’

Their voices were barely audible above the blaring car horns and the roar of the heavy road-paving machines.

The driver looked back over his shoulder. ‘If anyone’s in a rush, they better get out and walk. We’re going to be stuck here for a while.’

No one answered. The sweltering summer heat had made enduring the traffic jam in the minibus preferable to giving up and walking.

I cracked open the window. The hot air outside hit me like a wall of fire from the tanoor. Under my black mask, my face was soaked in sweat and I felt as though I couldn’t breathe. I longed to pull my mask down below my chin just long enough to breathe some fresh air. I did so for just a moment, but then immediately slid it back on again. Without a mask nowadays, I worry that my hijab is incomplete. Yet another thing I have become accustomed to over the last five years: covering my face and wearing a black abaya before leaving the house.

Mother would tell me to make sure my hijab didn’t fall and my hair didn’t show, and insist that I covered my face with a mask, covered from the eyes that assessed the crowds in the streets, markets and squares. Whenever I saw one of them in their white coats, a terror would grip me, and my hand would instinctively reach for my mask and headscarf, knowing that, at any moment, I could be stopped by an agent because of it.

It was a summer afternoon. On the side of the road, several workers with sunburnt skin and faces dripping with sweat were working with the steaming asphalt. Some were hastily smoothing the smoking tarmac while others were hammering the edges of the road with shovels. The smoke from the asphalt joined the hot air and the scorching sun.

A young worker’s clothes were drenched in sweat and clung to his body. He paused for a moment, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, before grabbing his shovel again.

It was because of this construction work that on both sides of the roads, the traffic stood still into the distance. Occasionally, a car would move forward slightly, only to stop again.

I rested my head against the glass window. The faces behind every car window looked tired, battered by the sun.

The man in the front seat was looking out of the window. Pointing to the asphalt paving machine on the side of the road, he said to the man next to him, ‘The truth is, no past government ever did this kind of work. Look at this, new roads are being built everywhere.’

‘Wallah, if we’re honest, they’ve achieved a lot in terms of development.’ The man beside him said. ‘Whichever province you visit, you see roads and bridges being built. Construction is going on everywhere.’

A third man agreed, ‘That’s what good government looks like. They have brought progress: starting the reconstruction effort while at the same time providing people with employment opportunities –’

I pressed my head harder against the window and tried to ignore the rest of what they were saying. What progress?

‘Sister?’ I was brought out of my thoughts by the girl next to me.

I turned to her in my seat. ‘Are you talking to me?’

‘Yes. Can you read?’

‘I can. Why?’

She pulled a folded piece of paper from her small plastic bag and held it up. ‘Can you read this address and tell me how long until we get there?’

I took the note from her. ‘It’s a bit further up. We haven’t reached it yet.’

She sighed softly and put the note back in her bag. She didn’t look over sixteen. The henna on her hands was fresh, and whenever she moved her fingers, the red patterns shone in the sunlight.

There was silence for a few moments. I couldn’t help myself from asking, ‘Didn’t you learn to read at school?’

She smiled. ‘I studied up to the third grade but then I couldn’t continue. I haven’t opened a single book in five years. What little I learned, I have forgotten now.’

‘Don’t you have anyone at home to teach you? A brother or your father?’

She laughed. ‘Thankfully I’m now in my own home.’

‘Do you mean you’re married?’

She nodded.

‘Where are you going now?’

She leaned in and whispered in my ear. ‘My husband is waiting for me. We’re going to see the midwife for an examination.’

‘For what?’ I asked.

‘I’m three months pregnant.’

I looked at her face. She was just a child herself. But I couldn’t say that, so instead I asked, ‘Why such a hurry? Surely you’re not old enough to get married, let alone have a child. How old are you?’

‘I will turn seventeen next year.’

What could I say? ‘Well, it sounds like you might have rushed into things.’

The old woman next to me, who had been quiet until then, joined in the discussion. ‘Don’t say that to her, my daughter. Getting married at a young age is better.’

The girl laughed softly, as if taking courage from the woman’s words.

The old woman continued confidently, ‘Take it from me – I was married at the age of twelve, and thank God, now I have grandchildren and great-grandchildren.’

I looked at both of them in disbelief.

The old woman turned to me, ‘Are you married?’

‘No, not yet.’

She laughed meaningfully. Then said something I didn’t catch under her breath and turned to me again. ‘So, that’s why you said she was being hasty.’

The girl and the old woman laughed together.

I didn’t like their laughter, it made me feel inadequate.  How could a girl who has not yet left her childhood world shoulder the responsibility of married life? And how could she be responsible for raising a child?

I fell silent for a moment. I saw a strange light of confidence in the young girl’s eyes that made me forget the words I had prepared. The old woman took my silence to mean that I was upset. She placed her hand on mine and, to reassure me, said, ‘Don’t be upset. I was just kidding.’

‘No, it’s okay, I’m not upset. I was only saying that she isn’t that old. There would have still been time for her to get married and have children. She could have finished her studies first.’

‘Nevertheless, girls belong in another home. And also, where is this education that you’re talking about now?’

‘It can’t be like this forever. Schools and universities might still reopen. And then she could have finished–’

The young girl said, ‘My uncle’s daughters said the same thing; before, they always said they didn’t want to get married and wished to finish their studies. Now that there are no universities and no education, they just sit in their childhood home. They’ve grown old too. God only knows if anyone will propose to them.’

I felt singled out by their whole conversation. They spoke as if they were discussing my life, deciding whether it was a failure or success, but they didn’t know my life story. In their eyes, and the eyes of society, women like me, deserved scorn. And why – because we had hoped? We had experienced and believed in something different? Perhaps, if I hadn’t been educated, hadn’t been partly through my studies five years ago, I would have felt just the same. But the difference was that I had. I had experienced all of that possibility, and now, the lack of it.

The girl looked over at the sitting cars. ‘It’s late… my man will be waiting for me in this scorching weather…’

‘If you’re in a hurry, you can get off here. It’s not that far – only a five-minute walk.’ I responded.

‘You know this area pretty well?’

The question immediately took me back to when I used to walk this exact path from the Dehbori bookshops to university. I wanted to tell her, Yes, at one time I used to walk to the university on this very street.

But her insult about her cousins – they just sit in their childhood home – was still ringing in my ears.  I was one of those girls whose life was a failure in her eyes. ‘Yes, I used to take this path a lot.’

She didn’t ask any more questions.

I left her alone as well.

The driver looked over his shoulder again and asked, ‘University! Does anyone want to get off?’

No one answered.

He shouted again, but his voice was drowned out by the noise of the cars. ‘University stop!’

Five years ago, when the minibus would arrive at this area everyone would shout. ‘Mister, we’re getting off! Please stop here…’

The minibus would then empty out. The girls holding their books would hurry down. Each of them carried the hope of a better future, and I was one of them. But today, not a single girl, myself included, got off at this bus stop.

A car slowly passed the entrance to the university. I couldn’t stop looking at the building. It looked completely the same, but also completely different, since now, of course, no female students stood outside the gates. All I want is for our lives to return to the way they were – a miracle, I know. But it is so much worse to have seen what we could hope for, only to lose it, again.

Today, as I passed this bus stop, I knew that a piece of me was still stuck here waiting.

The post The Bus Stop appeared first on English PEN.

I could have been published. I wrote a romantic story between two men, set in Republican Era China, and hadn’t realised I could write romance and love between woman and woman. One day I will publicly write queer. (In English.)

The editor’s voice bombed this household, like how when humans step into a bush all birds will hold beaks, running away. I left the house telephone number in the submission – I had a xiaolingtong, a budget mobile, but was not allowed to bring it to school. I smuggled it. But I was too worried I would miss the editor’s call, so I had to leak the telephone number. Like I knew the editor would call me.

The message landed on our lunch. Mama and baba’s faces were lotus flowers drenched in the storm. Clear and dripping. The editor couldn’t believe I was only 14. (I don’t believe, either.) Mama picked up the call; baba kept annoying me, asking me to show him the manuscript. Of course I didn’t. Or I won’t. And I can’t. My head was buried in the rice bowl, like the whole me, my whole body was shrinking, sinking into the steaming swirl. Baba buzzed with hidden pride at my pen name. I used it from then on.

These are all daytime scenes. I am not entitled to be invited to the night. And the long exhale was so long that it would crawl out from mama and baba’s room, biting my overheard tippy-toe.

A few days later, I was leaving the lunch table, and mama’s voice tangled me: I am warning you. Writing is the most dangerous thing in this world. You are too little, so just remember my words.

I can remember that I couldn’t wait to talk back: A lot of people are making money with writing and writing is exactly their career! Otherwise, what are we reading? Where can we get books? Because someone is writing!

But you are not someone’s daughter. You are from an ordinary family and you are just an ordinary girl. Give up and grow up, you will know what I mean. And all you need to do now is to prep for your exams. Be a good girl, OK? Me and your baba are making a living with so much hustle. Everything we have done is all for you. Have a think about us when you want to write this messy clutter.

Ma forgot that it was her fault. She dragged me into writing, into this muddy, clumsy pond. It’s she who dumped me books, trimmed my essay. Most of my nursery stories were made by her.

If I could, I would say: Ma, you really no need to worry.

14-year-old me didn’t have any ambition. All my longing was an iPhone 4. I guess 14‑year‑old me had a bit of talent in writing. If my work gets selected, the money will allow me to buy it. That’s all my dream. And my secret.

I fell in love with a girl. She’s my first love. Maybe ‘love’, in my unwitting heart, was only sharing one pair of wired earphones and smuggling drumbeat from an MP3 player in maths class. But I knew I love her. Mama didn’t like her because her hair was too short and sharp.

It’s our last year in middle school. Her parents were planning to send her abroad. No reason could beat them – no need for National College Entrance Examination in this province with another 600,000 young faces. I would die for an iPhone 4 to replace my xiaolingtong, for keeping in touch with her in time. Sharing pictures of lunch from canteen, or maybe reading fan fiction of our favourite K-pop band together. Virtually. Yet together.

If I could have asked: Ma, do you think we are an ordinary family? Or we are just pretending nothing happened, merrily?

Living in London in my late 20s, ex-council houses are my closest kinship. Windows stacked with duck-egg-blue frosted film, crowded. Like my hometown, the small town in northern China, and another land I don’t know how to call.

In crisp winters, the window is more like a slice. 6am, pigeons blasted over our pillows and pecked glass. We joke: they are living alarms, alerting us; don’t be late.

I saw millions of birds in London. Not the rare finds who will knock birdwatchers’ heartbeats, just ordinary birds. Pigeons, seagulls, magpies, crows. Like migrants. They hover around the sky and sea of this island every day. Freely. On clouds, god might have to give a way to them – to birds. But you know what I meant.

But I never saw swallows in London. Or, I overlooked them.

Ma said swallows only build nests under a blessed household. They bring good luck and blessings into the family and if you treat them well these little migrants will come back next spring. Your home is their home too. They only ask to settle under a roof, with mud, broken branches, artificial waste, and families. They live merrily only if you don’t banish them.

There’s a prose poem in my primary school textbook: The Song of the Stormy Petrel by Maxim Gorky. In Chinese, the bird’s name is ‘haiyan’ – ‘sea swallow’. I was hopeless at eating metaphors. I just swallowed words. In a gulp. In raw. I’ve forgotten everything the teacher said. I was only hoping this little bird could survive in the screaming storm, make it back to its temporary shelter. My confusion stumbled over there: why did sea swallow hope for a stronger storm? Why would it fight, against a little bird’s nature, against its wish to live? Nonsense.

Ma dumped piles of Russian and Soviet literature on me. She used to force me to read – her laolao, my great-grandma, is from the Soviet. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Mikhail Sholokhov…limping between borderlines, devouring me from paper.

I read everything with a flying hunger in my lungs. But mama’s picks were in exile. Characters in the books teased me. I didn’t get why Алёша is short for Алексей; translated into Chinese, they are in three and six characters, and their translated names don’t even share the same first character. Reading them was slicing me apart: one end is god, church, alcoholic husbands, affairs, winter taking someone’s son; the other is factories, workers, revolutions, people shuttering the empire.

Mama taught me to pronounce the authors’ names in Russian. I can’t gloss my tongue with the alveolar trill precisely, so I used Mandarin to copy the phonetics with my pious, also false, attempt. Maybe mama taught me in Mandarin too. I can’t recall. But I controlled the tone. The trick is to imagine you are standing on the ocean tide, naked, and then allow your mouth to flow with the wave.

Ma doesn’t like my micro-resistance. She repeated her laolao’s exile, saying she fled to China in the flock of upheaval. Everyone died. She survived. Only her.

The newborn swallows were opening mouths wide. Waiting.

It’s strange enough to live in a small orthodox town when your face isn’t Chinese enough. In my childhood, laolao wore wigs all the time, and mama hated my curls. My hair was black, tough, curly. I haunted mama to braid my hair with colourful rubber bands all day, and then with a ten-minute nap my head would become a chaotic nightclub. Much tighter, much better. Please. Mama. I always begged. I didn’t know I made her so much labour. Mama lied to me and cut my hair. Tears dripped and seasoned the offcuts. Salon is an animal trap. Ambushing. Chemical liquid had trimmed my hair, straightened me again and again. Or maybe ma just wanted to decorate me to be a purely perfect Chinese girl. Neat, behaved. She worried that people would judge her not a good mother. I couldn’t know. Or both. Wasn’t born as a boy, I’ve made mama criminal enough already.

Rarely, I saw laolao’s wig on the hook. A dangling nest, watching me back from dark.

For a long time, I always looked forward to flying to laolao’s home. At the doorstep, the door still open, she kissed my cheeks. Right, left, right. She bent down and held my face, looking carefully through me. Our little foreigner is coming home! Her nose rubbed my nose. Don’t say that. She is a Chinese one! Ma was not happy. Then they started fighting. I am used to it. My body was stretched to a battlefield, a small exclave, a puppet doll; their hands fiercely, gently pulled me towards two different lands’ authorities. Tear me apart.

I only want kisses. Kiss on eyelids. Kiss on forehead. Kiss on cheeks. Much and more. Dripping me away and away. Just take me away.

So my tears frightened the rice, burping. I choked; laolao blamed ma again with this new excuse, causing her to throw the blame to me. While a ghost sat around the table with us.

Until I saw it. In London Pride, surrounded by progress flags, floats, and balloons sailing from Canary Wharf, I saw the ghost. The protest banners in Chinese bleached my pride. Drowning in laughter, my face looked happy, while in hometown and homeland, girls and women and queers were still on chains. When chains, cage, prison are both metaphor and reality. Now I know metaphors very well.

Writing in native and non-native language is guilt: no space for writing queer in mother tongue, writing in English is a betrayal, a risky honour. A bleached laurel leaf. Bumping into my education rooted in parents’ money.

The haircut razor on my neck never leaves.

The knife I have been looking for, to put under my pillow: at 14, writing was not my priority. On many nights, I was overthinking about a well-known conversion clinic, the one only a two-hour drive away. I was overthinking about how if any ‘therapists’ break into my bedroom at mama and baba’s instruction and rob me away, a razor is not enough. I needed a knife. At least, I need a knife. But I can’t steal any from the kitchen. I never doubt ma would find out in seconds. She can sniff every desire under this roof. I am betting too. Bid on they love me enough so the knife is optional.

Like I observed the swallows under our roof, the ghost was just standing aside, observing me. We call it intimately: politics.

But I don’t know, great-grandma, are you standing there too? Standing together with the ghost, watching me? Can you tell me how to distinguish fear-driven migration and freedom-hunger driven? And what if fear is seeded in my blood? Like the sea swallow: the writer praised its brave move and ambition, but what if the little bird only wants to flee? To its home. Or whatever shelter there is, home or not.

When I checked every fragment in Russian history in the twentieth century, were you looking at me? Which mouldy paper with your braids woven down? To ask mama and laolao about you, I have to deal with the innocent failure of my coming out and mama’s command about marriage. Have not been home for years and years. Am still that little girl. Don’t dare to take home a horrible maths exam paper.

So how can I trace back?

I ask, and I know you won’t answer, yet I believe, ridiculously, that you are the only one who can understand me in this family. With desperate hope. Hope on a dead, a void, a person who I don’t know’s name, face, voice, and won’t ever echo me.

Maybe the sea swallow knows nothing, because the only thing they can do is fly. Like us. I don’t know if we are born in diaspora so we are becoming migrants, or if just because we are migrants diaspora is our final flyway.

I know you can’t answer me.

I refused to see laolao for many years. Forgive me. The war between ma and laolao never pauses. Before I left home, ma ordered me to visit her.

Laolao is growing shorter. At the doorstep, her arms stretched, swaying, held my face, looked through me vigilantly. Time floods back. She already knew our parting would be long as winters in Siberia.

In her dried and bare arms, her nose rubbed my nose. My kiss was on her hair whorl. I am much taller than her. Her real hair – black, tough, just like mine. With a tipped toe, her face nestled into the hollow of my neck. Clicking into place. Tears dripped down through my neck, collar, sewing a river between torn lands. A borderline. A melting.

Something glided through clouds, monsoons and ocean currents. Her kiss. Right. Left. Right. Transformed to a swallow. Finally, rest on my cheeks.

The post The Haircut Razor appeared first on English PEN.

My father was the cherry tree at the end of the yard. The kind whose highest branches no one could reach, but whose shade and fruit belonged to the whole alley. His stories were like that too: distant, tangled, covered in thousand-year-old mist. Every time he told them, they changed shape slightly. Different details, different endings. I am not even sure he himself knew anymore which one was true.

I don’t think he realised how much sorrow had quietly sedimented in those stories. He never complained. His grief had no tears. It came out in painful breaths I once saw trembling through his shoulders – just once. Some people carry sadness so modestly, as if suffering should not inconvenience others.

His only memory of his father was a coffin being carried out of the house on the shoulders of men dressed in black. Whenever I think of my father, I see a three-year-old boy with wide, shining black eyes, clinging to the doorframe, stunned, not yet understanding that his life has been permanently split open.

My grandfather owned a traditional felt-hat workshop. Then the Pahlavi hat became fashionable as Reza Shah tried to dress Iran in the clothes of modern Europe, ordering the gendarmes to shut down the old workshops. When they finally reopened the place, all that remained of the mountains of felt was sad grey dust and fattened moths. His whole livelihood whirled in the shape of thick-bodied moths dancing through the clouds of dust, and that same year he died young, perhaps more of grief than illness, leaving behind Touba, whose beauty was legendary among the relatives, with her long black hair and her three half-grown sons.

Nobody in the family spoke much about Touba’s second husband. He was not considered ‘worthy’ of the Yavar Sultan daughter. Uncle Ali was the only fruit of that cursed marriage, and Touba died shortly after giving birth to him. My father – the second son of Touba and Ahmad – learned from those early years how to wash and feed a baby brother, how to grow up in other people’s houses, how never to really be a child at all.

His heart grew tired far too early, refusing to keep going all the way to sixty. I knew him for only fifteen years before it stopped beating.

This is what the doctor said: ‘Inside his chest, the coronary arteries slowly closed around the last small light. Oxygen abandoned the myocardium. The ventricles forgot their ancient rhythm, fluttering like frightened birds before the great red muscle fell into silence.’

He cooked beautifully and dangerously, mostly for himself. He used to say a person dies only once. The last thing he cooked for us was aloo Mosamma, plum stew, swimming in nearly an inch of oil. But then again could plum stew exist without oil? Because that deep orange-red only becomes truly seductive when a shimmering layer of oil multiplies its glow a hundred times over.

Whenever I miss him, I slice onions into thin crescents and drop them into oil that’s hot but not too hot. Patiently, I stir them and watch them slowly surrender: translucent, then soft and golden. When their smell fills the house, I scatter over them a generous spoonful of turmeric to deepen their gold. I gather them gently with a wooden spoon and press them against the side of the pot so the excess amber oil slides back down and stays behind for frying the chicken. The onion strands, now collapsed into one another, a glowing bundle of gold, rest quietly aside while I place the chicken pieces into the oil. Once both sides gain colour, I add the swollen Barghani plums I had soaked earlier – though if you cannot find Barghani plums, the soft pitted Lidl ones will do, even if the difference between the two is, as we say in Persian, the difference between my beloved moon and the celestial moon, as vast as the earth and the sky. Then comes a little tomato paste. Not too much. Just enough to tint the stew. This is not a deep red dish. It lives somewhere between gold and orange and red, like the summer sunsets of childhood, when an inexplicable joy used to run beneath our skin.

Everything turns together in the oil. The onions return to the pot. Salt, cinnamon, and enough water. I close the lid. They become acquainted in private, slowly settling into one another.

Then I turn to grinding saffron. Carefully, like a restorer handling relics, I open the jar of red gold and pour the brittle crimson threads, once alive in purple flowers in the plains of eastern Iran, into the stone mortar. My mother always added a few grains of sugar before grinding, to battle the dampness hidden in the strands. The humidity of this coastal city of mine is no less cruel than the coastal city where I was born.

I pour the sugar over the saffron and press the pestle down. My wrist aches. The saffron cracks softly, loosening, preparing to release its hidden colour into the cold stone. If only the dampness lodged inside my bones could be cured so simply.

I have seen people place ice cubes on saffron to draw out its redness. But my mother always used hot water, covering it gently, letting it bloom slowly. If I were saffron, I too would choose warmth and steeping over the violent shock of ice.

Sometimes I think someone must come into our lives to sprinkle sugar over us, absorb our dampness, crack open our stiffness, warm us gently, and leave us alone long enough to steep, so that perhaps our true essence may finally bleed outwards. Perhaps we never allow ourselves enough time because we are terrified of discovering our own impurity, terrified the world will realise we are counterfeit. As Khayyam said: ‘Once the curtain falls, neither you remain nor I.’

But assaying a human soul does not take six seconds. Nor six days.

For now, I am meant to spend six days in an apartment in a block of flats where T. S. Eliot once lived. But imagining Thomas inside these seductive red wall none of this feels strange to me.

Transition has always been difficult for me. It took two days before the ice inside me thawed and I could finally start to write. It is now the third day and my anxious saffron threads are only just beginning to adjust to the walls around me. But they still carry the smell of the open plains. Their essence has not yet begun to flow.

The first time I heard Eliot’s name I was in my first year at university. In our dramatic literature class, we had to read Four Quartets in the translation of our professor, Dr Farhad N. Kermani, who had lived in England for years. Only much later, when my English had finally become strong enough, did I read the poems in their original language and fall in love with the architecture of Eliot’s mind. Only then did I understand why, at nineteen, my feverish avant-garde-loving brain had experienced his language like scripture, why I imagined him as some prophet from a thousand years ago. It was all the fault of poetry’s stubbornness in translation: that precise place where language fails, translation collapses exhausted, and the poem remains standing among the ruins.

You need stillness to solve it.

And I have traded youthful frustration for a newfound patience, discovering that some poetry requires the passage of time. What once felt like an impenetrable wall now feels like a mirror; I no longer seek to conquer Eliot’s words, but simply let his meditations on memory wash over me in a rhythm I have finally learned to breathe. Just like plum stew: every household in Iran makes it differently. I remember the last meal my dad made before going to hospital on a wintery night just two months after my fifteenth birthday.

I am sitting beneath floorboards Eliot once walked across, listening to the echo of my broken voice, reading:

So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight.

Tears fall and dissolve the very paragraph I cut out of this morning’s draft because I had convinced myself it was too abstract, too fragmented. Who would care about the broken shards of memory rattling round the labyrinth of my mind anyway? Certainly not the publishing industry. They prefer trauma neatly arranged with chapter titles and redeemable endings.

I am thrown back to a window overlooking the rear courtyard of a doctor’s office somewhere in central Tehran. An empty swimming pool carpeted with orange leaves dissolving into the exhausted brown of the walls around it. In the dying light of that autumn afternoon, the whole scene lodged itself inside my eighteen-year-old mind as the most beautiful and devastating image I had ever seen. Nothing happened that day. No tragedy. No revelation. Nobody died. Yet for the first time I felt the unbearable lightness of existence settling onto my narrow shoulders. Shoulders that had probably learned long before I was born to fold themselves inwards, occupy less space, remain braced for impact, finally manifesting decades later in the elegant medical disguise called tension myalgia. A condition that sounds almost sophisticated until you realise it simply means the body has spent forty years clenching against life like an unpaid intern in the Ministry of Catastrophe.

It probably began the day three terrified wild horses hurled their bodies onto my father’s tiny brown Zhiyan while I was still floating quietly inside my mother’s womb. Cells remember; mine certainly did. I made the decision right there, suspended in amniotic fluid and generational anxiety, that I would never drive.

Thirty years later, I tried to betray this prenatal vow. During my second driving lesson, a seagull – strutting with the level of confidence that, had I possessed even one thousandth of it, I would by now certainly hold political office somewhere – marched slowly and ceremoniously in front of the car like a decorated military commander inspecting troops.

I turned the engine off, stepped out of the car, and said ‘That’s it. I can never drive. What if he stopped and I ran him over?’

My father stopped just in time, just before the tiny car crumpled beneath the weight of three horses, managing to save himself, his wife, and the three and a half children inside the car.

That might have been the last collective journey the Shams family took before the storm of the Revolution arrived and rearranged everybody’s fate. Even my own brief little life – I was only two months old – was apparently worthy of historical interruption. We were all still trembling from the aftershocks of the Revolution when the war began. A war that lasted eight years and has now been sanctified for forty-five, polished endlessly until grief itself became state property.

I was thirteen kilos of pale anxiety with straight black hair when my twenty-five-year-old uncle disappeared in the war. Shortly after, my father had a stroke before reaching forty. The memories from those years survive in my mind like the torn serial pages of my mother’s old magazines: out of order, incomplete, sometimes impossible to distinguish from nightmares.

I hear the sound of whipping coming from a small makeshift headquarters crowded with bearded men intoxicated by ideology and cheap authority. I wedge one tiny foot onto the curved spine of our sour orange tree and drag my frail body upwards, trying to see what’s happening behind the barbed wire they have stretched between our house and their little torture theatre. I am too short to see anything, so I do what children in war zones do best: I imagine the rest.

Even now, when I close my eyes, I can still feel the rough black bark of the twisted orange tree scraping against my delicate skin. I remember the small protruding knot where a young branch had once grown before being hacked away, leaving behind a large misshapen button on the trunk – a perfect foothold for my thin nervous feet. I remember the colour of the moss, green enough to leave stains on my clothes if I wasn’t careful. I remember the smell of young citrus leaves in the garden of house number 31.

Those memories arrive trembling like the silent eight-millimetre films my father occasionally showed us on his Kodak Brownie projector: rare, magical events. The film reel of my own childhood seems to have been edited by an incompetent amateur using cheap tape: abrupt cuts, frightened fast-forwarded images, forbidden books buried in the garden by flashlight, photographs from the coronation hidden behind a yellow-and-black stained-glass portrait of Ayatollah Taleghani, the elderly neighbour collapsing after hearing her son’s execution announced on the morning radio, my mum quietly crying, my dad repeating over and over: ‘Ali will come back. Ali will come back.’

And Ali did come back. In a box perhaps. Or a bag. I never understood exactly. A handful of bones and a military tag with, presumably, his name on it. He finally arrived from Karbala-5. Shalamcheh.

The only surviving image I have of Uncle Ali is him standing beside the courtyard pond holding a plastic giraffe, filling its hollow stomach with water and then spraying me and his little son Mohsen while we screamed with delight. That single bright image floats alone among the disordered scenes in my memory, a surviving frame from a film whose reels were burned long ago.

My father was the cherry tree at the end of the yard. On Monday, when I return home, I will make plum stew in his memory. And I will read Eliot aloud while the stew patiently comes into itself:

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away…
the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

The post Plum Stew appeared first on English PEN.

What is the difference between Conscience and Imagination? It’s like sorting the air from the wind. Both are invisible. Both are accessible to everyone but easily ignored. In ancient times they appeared as ghosts or birds. Now they are hidden in the depths of the Self. It takes solitude to find them and yet miraculously, they contain insights about others.

In the syntax of both, there is ‘AS’. ‘Do unto others as you wish they would do unto you!’ says Conscience. ‘As I feel pain, so might others’ says Imagination. Who invented AS?  It came before Conscience. It is that sixth sense of similarity which drives Imagination. As one thing, so another and another…

Imagination is boundless. It is a Place of Supply. Conscience attends to limits. It makes rules for the Place of Scarcity. Conscience divides fairly and judges those who take more. Imagination conjures a vision then generously steals from it.

Conscience without Imagination is constrained by character. Sometimes it is shrill, self-righteous, furious, sometimes equivocal. Imagination without Conscience decays into fantasy. As the pressure mounts, who will risk the delays of weighing one against the other, which is called thinking?

Conscience (according to Hannah Arendt) is a side-effect of thinking. Poetry is a side-effect of imagining. Does that make poetry the aunt of the Conscience? Can poetry hold Conscience to Imagination?

Conscience is an interlude. Imagination is a prelude. Conscience resists unfairness. Imagination resists shallowness. Conscience cross-questions the self. Imagination listens to the selves of everything.

So these two aspects of the mind go about their business – often in agreement, occasionally in dispute. Imagination refuses to close a question, refuses useful definitions. Conscience, having laboured to find certainty, is quick to act. When it comes to action, Conscience is strategic, Imagination is intuitive. They argue endlessly. Under the delicate system of their hopes and disagreements, human thinking continues.

But it happens sometimes that a third element intrudes upon this system: Fear. With a newsflash, with a stirring speech, Fear disables the mind, divides Conscience from Imagination, beats down, defunds, trivialises poetry, which is the engine of AS – the very syntax of thinking. We are lucky that Fear has not hidden herself in our time, but has written her name on the UK Terror laws, our modern equivalents of the witch trials. Just as the suspect witch could be tried by ducking and if she drowned she was innocent, if she survived she was guilty – so the terror suspect can be punished by process: imprisoned without trial for fifteen months, wrestled to the ground, denied her letters, her books, her religion, handcuffed to a male officer when she needs the bathroom, isolated from her family. These abuses (all of which were documented against the Filton 24) drove Qesser Zurah to go on hunger strike. When it was mentioned that she might die, our MPs, like a crowd at a witch-ducking, laughed.

At this point, if the poet doesn’t protest, she will lose her job.

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I used to think that my conscience was evident in the positions I took. I thought it meant signing open letters, writing moral statements, condoning or condemning.  Now I understand that that was an incomplete view. There is nothing at all external about having a conscience. It’s an entirely interior thing. I think mine lives in my gut. It communicates with my brain often, alongside my anxiety (which lives in my head), my id (on my left shoulder) and my superego (on my right). In searching for it, I sort the wheat from the chaff. When I successfully find my conscience, I find my north star.

On the page (and when done well), being guided by my conscience can lead to alchemy: a rare meeting of minds between a writer and a reader. My job as a writer is to repeatedly think it through, enough times that a reader’s brain flashes with recognition in response to something they have not yet articulated alone.

In the summer of 2020, anchored to screens and free of distractions, our collective attention narrowed.  Busier times mean that a conscience can be drowned out by obligation, routine, or desire. The tumult of 2020 required us to tune into it.

In the space of a few days, Rhian Graham’s conscience developed rapidly. A global outcry against George Floyd’s murder had stirred something in her, and a friend suggested she read my book.  Years later she told me that she felt a bit ashamed of herself, as though she had let a lot of how the world functions pass her by.  A protest against racism was planned just days later in Bristol city centre, and she was determined to attend. Rhian’s decisions on that day, led by her conscience, resulted in her becoming one of the Colston Four.  In the thick of the crowd, she and others made a beeline for the city’s statue of philanthropist and slave trader Edward Colston. Using ropes and teamwork, they pulled it down.

The Colston Four were charged with causing criminal damage and sent to trial. They were acquitted in 2022.

When I learnt that Rhian had mentioned my book in court, I made it my mission to find her.  We met on a sunny day, and together we visited the statue’s empty plinth. Rhian gestured to a dent in the pavement where it initially struck the ground. ‘That impact on the floor,’ she said, ‘reverberated out from the city.’ That day, she gifted me a piece of the knotted rope that toppled the statue. It’s framed in my living room now, a consequence of my conscience, and hers. The words I wrote years prior didn’t stay static on the page. I look at the rope in its frame. It exists because of a chain that includes me.

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It seems now, rightly, that every person with a conscience is asking themselves what they can do.

So what is it that the writer can – uniquely – do? As we live through our day, as we eat, dress, wash, as I try to write this piece children are being amputated, orphaned. Cities are reduced to rubble, the land and the rivers poisoned, norms and laws dismantled, institutions corrupted to make more room for war. I cannot speak for the poet, but in a time of urgency the writer of fiction cannot afford the time and the attention needed by the process of prospecting and excavating and coaxing and tweaking that will – maybe – yield the story.

The answer for some of us has been to walk away from our small quarry and join the good and humbling company of citizens of the world, from young direct-action activists to pensioner protestors, from dockers to doctors to students to lawyers to journalists to academics, to musicians and actors, why even to – a few – politicians,  all speaking truth to power, all using what tools they possess to hold off or to mitigate or document the unfolding catastrophe.

What do we bring to the company?

There is a hadith of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) that says: ‘If one of you should see an instance of wrongdoing let them change it with their hand, and if they cannot then with their tongue, and if they cannot then with their hearts, and that is the least you can do.’

We, the writers, are the ones entrusted with words.

In 2006, Mahmoud Darwish, responding to the Israeli bombing of Lebanon, wrote a ‘Diary’ in the Palestinian literary magazine, al-Karmel. It takes the form of 15 short pieces of prose and poetry. This is piece number 5:

Smoke rises from me / I reach out a hand to collect my limbs scattered from so many bodies / besieged from land and sky and sea and language./ The last plane has taken off from Beirut airport and left me in front of the screen to watch / with millions of viewers / the rest of my death / As for my heart, I see it roll / like a pinecone, from Mount Lebanon, to Gaza.

Yet Darwish, even Darwish with his genius for the word, two years later when he addressed the first season of the Palestine Festival of Literature – PalFest, spoke of the difficulty of the Palestinian writer who ‘has to use the word to resist the military occupation, and has to resist – on behalf of the word – the danger of the banal and the repetitive.’

And as the years and the massacres and the years and the displacements and the years and the injustices have rolled on, the ‘difficulty’ for all of us has taken root and bloomed. So what do we bring to the table? A reputation perhaps? a readership? and any facility we may have with words in quotidian use. And the hope that one day the world will be such that we will once again have space to mine our hearts, to coax out precious fragments and fashion them into the patterns that speak to those who see them and find an echo in their hearts.

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